The secret corner of Tenerife that will change your mind about the island

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There were no poisoners lurking behind the dragon tree, and Hercule Poirot was nowhere to be seen. But in a roped-off bower in a corner of the orchid garden, Agatha Christie was sitting in conversation with a mystery man in a straw hat. Who was he? Nearby, some American tourists were speculating that it was Ernest Hemingway – though I had my doubts. I’d never really had him down as an orchid enthusiast. But there was no mystery about the Queen of Crime’s presence – albeit in the form of a shop-mannequin, dressed in various shades of grey and beige and with ankles primly crossed. She was partly what had brought me to northern Tenerife in the first place.

It’s 90 years since Christie visited Tenerife. Accompanied by her 12-year-old daughter Rosalind and secretary Charlotte Fisher, she arrived on the island by steamer on February 4 1927 in flight from the press attention that had dogged her since her infamous 11-day disappearance two months previously. (After a high-profile missing person campaign, fuelled by increasingly lurid speculation about her fate, she was finally found in a fashionable Harrogate hotel, after being recognised by one of the resident banjo players. She had registered as Mrs Teresa Neele, using the surname of her husband’s then-mistress.)

When they disembarked in Tenerife’s main port of Santa Cruz, Christie and her two companions headed north to the lush Valle de la Orotava – a spectacular emerald swathe of palm trees, araucarias and laurels – and to the coastal resort of Puerto de la Cruz, then a small fishing village and considered a part of La Orotava town. I was following in her footsteps – but also in the button-booted footsteps of two intrepid Victorian-born women painters whose pictures of the region I’d only recently discovered. The botanical artist, Marianne North, whose works are on permanent exhibition in Kew Gardens, visited Tenerife in 1875. Then, in 1909, came the watercolourist Ella du Cane, travelling with her sister Florence, a writer. Together the du Canes produced a pioneering travelogue The Canary Islands (1911), illustrated by Ella’s paintings. It was stumbling upon this unexpected treasure at a secondhand book stall that had finally prompted me to pack my bags and go.

The botanical artist Marianne North was another fanCredit:
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I’ll admit that Tenerife had never been on my list of must-dos. But all of my illustrious predecessors had written spell-bindingly about the loveliness of this northern region, about landscapes studded with cypresses and oleander, about exquisite parks and gardens decked with vivid red tangles of Canarian bell flowers, and about the magical sight of Mount Teide in the distance, its peak afloat on a pillow of clouds. It sounded worlds away from my brief experience of garish Los Cristianos on the south coast of the island, with its (to me) dispiriting guantlet of gaudy seafront bars. The prospect of discovering a garden paradise - maybe even with a smattering of art - became too tantalising to resist.

Mount Teide

Following Christie’s example, I plumped for Puerto de la Cruz as a base – now, inevitably, much more developed than at the time of her visit, but still recognisably a proper little town complete with a traditional harbour and old fishing quarter. Christie and her entourage stayed in the luxurious parkland hotel Gran Hotel Taoro (now closed), where she enjoyed strolling through the gardens, notebook in hand. I opted for its modern-day equivalent – the classic Hotel Botanico, opposite the town’s fabulous Botanical Gardens and with its own gorgeous enclave of lawns, palms and lakeside grottos. An added plus was the striking Canarian art on display throughout the building. The fourth floor hall landing, leading to my room, was lined with luminous works by Cristino de Vera (b. Santa Cruz 1931), a procession of what he once called ‘brilliant bodies’, swimming with refracted light.

Puerto de la Cruz itself, a leisurely downhill stroll from the hotel, proved an appealing blend of old and new. Christie had taken a dim view of the swimming on offer from the town beach. (‘The bathing, to keen bathers, was terrible. You lay on a sloping volcanic beach, on your face, and you dug your fingers in and let the waves come up and cover you. But you had to be careful they did not cover you too much. Masses of people had been drowned there.’)

In the 1970s, the town came up with an ingenious, if slightly bizarre, solution to this problem by effectively replacing the beach altogether. The Lanzarote-born artist César Manrique was commissioned to design an extraordinary artificial lake above the beach and facing out to sea - a vast jewel-bright complex of pools, fountains, sculptures and gardens. Surveying a sign forbidding a bewildering array of objects (including picnic baskets, stereos and cats), I found myself rather doubting that flashy Lago Martiánez would have been quite Christie’s taza de té. But townspeople and tourists alike seem to love it. And the shady walkways and rocky islands could well have harboured a killer or two…

Elsewhere, it was a joy to find Puerto de la Cruz’s waterfront entrancingly timeless, although still embellished here and there with occasional splashes of arty quirkiness. The old town is a labyrinth of winding streets of centuries-old saffron- and cumin-coloured houses, and stately rows of timbered Canarian mansions set around leafy squares. A stone promenade from the fishermen’s chapel, the white-washed Erimita de San Telmo, leads to a horseshoe fishing harbour and 18th century Customs House, and from there to the old residential fishing quarter of Ranilla – nowadays also a riot of colour. The area is part of an ambitious Puerto Street Art project comprising 13 huge murals on the sides of buildings. I was transfixed by a dramatic human pyramid of black matchstick men (‘The Border of Paradise’) massed like breached barbed wire against sea, sky and smoky-pink cloud, painted by Copenhagen-based street artist Victor Ash.

Inland, I discovered that the heart of Puerto de la Cruz’s ‘mother’ town, La Orotava – five miles from the sea - is even more astonishingly well-preserved. Surrounded by glorious vineyards producing pale Malvasia wines and the sweet Canary ‘sack’ celebrated by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, it’s time-machine perfect, with elegant terraces of colonial houses fretted with elaborate balconies of Canarian pine.

La Orotava is astonishingly well-preservedCredit:
GETTY

Many traditional crafts are still practised there. A small circle of women sat on wooden stools in a courtyard, chattering as their fingers fluttered at dizzying speed over the linen cloths they were plucking into calados, intricate ‘open thread’ embroidery made from linen.

At the edge of the town, I met Manuel Hernandez, who has worked in the town’s gofio mill for 46 years. In an oxblood-red outhouse, built in 1736 and teetering amidst a jumble of fruiting medlar trees, he and his co-workers grind the wheat that makes the popular snack. Everywhere you go on the island, you’ll see older locals dipping into packets of it, like bags of crisps.

There were endless lovely and surprising things to discover in northern Tenerife (see below). But, for me, the crowning glory of my visit was experiencing for myself the time-warp charm of that orchid garden, back in Puerto de la Cruz. The oldest surviving garden on Tenerife, it’s in the grounds of Sitio Litre - a mansion that has been in British hands since it was built in the 1730s. Its seclusion and tranquillity, adrift with sweet scents, had cast its special spell over every one of my inspirational lady travel guides.

The orchids at Puerto de la CruzCredit:
GETTY

Trail-blazer Marianne North, who stayed as a guest at the house for two months, wrote that she had ‘never smelt roses so sweet’ and described how ‘the ground was white with fallen orange and lemon petals’. Arguably the loveliest of Ella du Cane’s watercolours, painted some 35 years later, is one depicting a blaze of red bougainvillea spilling down the wall of the house, with a muted blue sea in the distance. And Christie, an honoured visitor during that brief respite from her troubles in 1927, was to draw memorably on the beauty of the garden for the setting of her atmospheric short story ‘The Man from the Sea’.

And the mystery man, rapt in conversation with Christie in the bower? The man my fellow visitors were pretty convinced was Hemingway? Curiosity finally got the better of me, and I asked Sitio Litre’s charming current owner, John Lucas, for a clue to his identity. No, he confirmed: hard-drinking, big-game-hunting Hemingway hadn’t ever taken time out to smell the roses in Puerto de la Cruz. The man in the straw hat was actually Mr Quin, the enigmatic character who drifts like a leaf through the short story collection that includes ‘The Man from the Sea’. And the name of the collection? The Mysterious Mr Quin. Mystery solved.

Getting there

Most international flights to Tenerife land at Tenerife South airport (‘Reina Sofia’). Airlines offering flights (from a number of UK airports) include British Airways, easyJet, Monarch, Ryanair and Thomson. Puerto de la Cruz is approximately 90km from the airport – around 75 mins by taxi (€104 day/€118 night) or 1 hr 45 mins by No 343 bus (€13.55 one-way; see titsa.com for timetables).

Linda Cookson travelled to Puerto de la Cruz as a guest of Sovereign (01293 765 003, sovereign.com), which offers seven nights at Hotel Botanico (including a spa deal) from £875 per person, B&B, based on two sharing; prices include flights from Gatwick or a range of regional airports, and private transfers. Where available, guests have airport security fasttrack and access to No1 Lounges.

The gardens of Sitro Litre are open to the public daily 9.30 – 17.30 (00 34 922 382 417; €4.75 entry).

The biennial Agatha Christie Festival will be held on November 6-12 this year.

Tenerife's best-kept secrets

Magic carpets

In June, La Orotava gears up for ‘Corpus Christi’ celebrations. Streets and squares are transformed into a kaleidoscope of flower-petal ‘carpets’ and floor mosaics crafted from multi-coloured volcanic sands. The festival’s grand finale - Día de las Alfombras (‘The Day of the Carpets’; June 22 this year) – unveils the most spectacular display: a sweeping biblical triptych covering Plaza del Ayuntamiento.

Wine on tap

Family-run winery Bodegas Monje near El Sauzal, 16 km east of Puerto, sits amidst beautiful rolling countryside, and still grows some of its vines by traditional methods (00 34 922 585 027, bodegasmonje.com). Call by for a pre-booked tour and wine-tasting (€12pp, for three wines and three home-made tapas dishes), or an amazing lunch of cochino negro (barbecued ‘black pork’) on the outside terrace (€13.50).

Pack a picnic and head 16km west of Puerto to the coastal town of San Juan de la Rambla (above the beach of the same name). Sloping streets lined by a jumble of ice cream-coloured houses lead down to the Mirador del Charco viewing point. Below, reached by steps and crazy-paving, you’ll find ‘Charco de la Laja’, a brilliant-blue natural rock pool and a secret locals’ swimming spot.

A small dragon

The 1,000-year-old Drago Milenario dragon tree in Icod de los Vinos, 25km west of Puerto, is a Tenerife icon: it featured on Spanish 1,000 peseta notes. If you don’t fancy paying the €4 entry into touristy Parque del Drago, you’ll see the tree just as well from the town’s lovely church square, Plaza de la Iglesia, shaded by jacarandas and Indian laurels. Afterwards, seek out its cute 100-year-old little brother, Drago Chico, on nearby Calle San Antonio.

Tenerife's most famous treeCredit:
LUISMIX - GETTY

Dine like a local

Gauchinches, seldom discovered by tourists, are makeshift local eateries where wine-growers are permitted to serve home-cooked food with the wine that they sell on-site. Head 11km east of Puerto and join cheery throngs of locals in Santa Ursula’s Guachinche Lito, set in a rustic garden smothered in flowers and patrolled by chickens (Calle Tijarafe 35; 00 34 630 590 007). Expect to pay around €8 per person for a meal with wine (closed Wednesdays).